Charles F. Richter (1900–85,) fully Charles Francis Richter, was an American physicist and seismologist. He developed the “Richter Scale” for quantifying earthquake intensity.
Born on a farm in Overpeck, Ohio, Richter attended Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech.) While working at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Richter met seismologist Beno Gutenberg and became engrossed in seismology. They devised the Richter Scale of earthquake strength.
In comparison to previous measures that characterized earthquakes in terms of damage to buildings and the behavior and response of the population, the Richter Scale is a quantitative measure of the amplitude of the waves produced by the earthquake. Gutenberg suggested that the scale be logarithmic so that an earthquake of magnitude 7 is ten times stronger than a 6, a hundred times stronger than a 5, and so on. Published in 1935, the Richter Scale immediately became the standard measure of earthquake intensity.
In 1937, Richter returned to Caltech as a research assistant and spent the rest of his career as a professor of seismology from 1952. He played a crucial role in establishing the Southern California seismic array and published Seismicity of the Earth (1954, with Gutenberg) and Elementary Seismology (1958.)
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Don’t wait for extraordinary circumstance to do good; try to use ordinary situations.
—Charles F. Richter
Topics: Action, Opportunity
It is good to have measured myself, to recognize my limitations.
—Charles F. Richter
Spring makes everything young again except man.
—Charles F. Richter
My main point today is that usually one gets what one expects, but very rarely in the way one expected it.
—Charles F. Richter
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